THE STAT GUY
Sticking with Baird has left KC stuck
By BRADFORD DOOLITTLE
The Kansas City Star
The Royals have always been a franchise that has been, if nothing else, extraordinarily patient. In no instance is this patience more manifest than in the continuing presence of Allard Baird in the team’s front office.

We’ve all heard the clichéd palaver about patience, it being a virtue and all that. But seldom addressed are questions regarding when patience lapses into passivity and when passivity disintegrates into neglect.

Baird is one of five persons to hold the general manager’s job with the Royals and, after all this time, his tenure is still the shortest of the five. His program has also been the least successful and he’s not really close to his predecessor, Herk Robinson, who didn’t exactly leave behind a legacy of triumph.

But there is no reason to dwell on Baird’s performance record, or at least the bare bones of it in terms of wins and losses. That’s old ground. Instead, it’s important to put that record in historical context and to ask what it says not about Baird, but about the franchise that employs him.

By general manager, we refer to the person with each team who holds the responsibilities we normally associate with the job in the modern sense. He makes trades, signs players, hires managers, etc. According to data taken from Baseball America, since 1950, the average American League general manager has served a term of 6.3 seasons. The average winning percentage is, obviously, right about .500.

Through Monday, Baird has been the Royals GM for 5.1 seasons, and that is without giving him credit for the second half of the 2000 season, during which he took the reins from Robinson.

The Royals’ 2-10 start dropped Baird’s winning percentage since the beginning of 2001 to .397. Since 1950, only six of 108 AL general managers have won fewer than 40 percent of their games. The average tenure of the other five has been 1.7 seasons.

If we raise the bar to a .450 winning percentage, we find that the average tenure is 3.3 seasons. Of the 21 general managers below that threshold, only three lasted longer than Baird.

One was Randy Smith, who ran the Tigers for seven seasons of .412 ball. Another was George Selkirk, who accumulated 7.9 seasons with the early Kansas City Athletics and the Washington Senators of the early 1960’s. His teams won at a .418 clip. The most recent example is Chuck “Don’t Call Me Hedley” LaMar, the only GM employed during the first eight seasons of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. His teams posted a .401 winning percentage.

What we don’t see on the list of sub-.450 GMs is an example of a team sticking with a person through a prolonged stretch of losing and then turning it around and becoming successful.

Dave Dombrowski’s Tigers seem improved this season and may yet justify the team’s faith in him. But Dombrowski had a track record of success in the National League which, if incorporated into this database, would greatly improve his standing. Selkirk’s Senators never approached .500. Joe Klein had one winning season in 1986, but his Indians lost 101 games the next season.

So, the Royals’ patience with Baird is, indeed, historically unique and not particularly encouraging. To bring this discussion back around, what does this patience say about the David Glass-owned Royals? Can it really be called patience? If not, what can we call it?

Sometimes, number-crunching doesn’t provide answers. It only produces more questions. This, it would seem, is one of those times.